The tally represents the preliminary results of an Air Force review launched after POLITICO reported that an Air National Guard crew had stayed at Turnberry.

The U.S. Air Force has lodged crews at President Donald Trump’s Scotland resort up to 40 times since 2015, a figure that is far higher than previously known.

The tally represents the preliminary results of an Air Force review launched after POLITICO reported last week that an Air National Guard crew stayed at Turnberry in March. Congressional Democrats have also been investigating military stays at the property, but have yet to receive any information from the Pentagon.

The figure does not indicate how many of the stays have occurred since Trump became president. But the Air Force has significantly ramped up its overnight stops in Scotland under Trump after signing a contract with the Prestwick Airport — situated 20-plus miles from Turnberry — in the waning months of the Obama administration. Since 2015, the service has lodged crews in the area 659 times, meaning up to 6 percent of those stays were at Turnberry.

​The figure also does not account for the total number of people the Air Force has put up at Trump Turnberry during those roughly 40 stays. POLITICO previously reported that Air Force crews of five to nearly 40 people have lodged at Trump's waterside property over at least four stays since September 2018.

The Air Force has said the refueling stops at Prestwick — and all related overnight stays — are well within Pentagon guidelines. Prestwick frequently books the Air Force crews’ lodging at Turnberry, the airport acknowledged in a statement, and often arranges for their transportation to and from the resort. Officials have also said the Turnberry bookings fall within acceptable rates for military travel, as military members are charged a government rate as low as $130 per night.

But the Air Force did concede that the appearance of staying at the president’s posh property might create a negative perception, and it has launched an internal review that will assess the “guidance associated with the use of civil airports and lodging selection for aircrew at en route locations,” according to a memo issued Monday.

Still, the issue is the latest example of the intersection of Trump’s business interests and what used to be unremarkable government policies.

Air Force crews have been lodging at Turnberry because of the increasing importance of Prestwick Airport for refueling military aircraft. In 2015, the Air Force made 95 stops there, lodging in the area 40 times. But through August of this year, the Air Force had made 259 stops at Prestwick, staying overnight nearby 220 times.

The roughly 40 stays at Turnberry are likely to raise eyebrows among congressional Democrats, who have said the practice raises conflict-of-interest concerns and might violate the Constitution's domestic emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from receiving money from the federal government other than his salary.

The House Oversight Committee has been investigating U.S. military expenditures at and around Turnberry since the spring, and has threatened to subpoena officials in an attempt to get more information from the Pentagon.

Stays at Turnberry have occurred as recently as late June of this year, when a bus carrying an air crew en route to Iraq arrived at Turnberry, according to a person who was there and an Instagram post by an Air Force crew member.

Ralph Porciani, the general manager at Trump Turnberry, declined to tell POLITICO on Wednesday how many service members have stayed at the resort in recent years, claiming that the staff doesn’t ask its guests “what they do for a living.” The vast majority of the crews lodging at Turnberry show up in uniform, however, crew members told POLITICO. Porciani added that reporters should stop trying to “dig up dirt” on Turnberry, which was “on its knees” before Trump and his family bought it in 2014.

On Monday, lawmakers resumed a push for the Senate to adopt an amendment that would bar the Pentagon from spending money at nearly five dozen Trump properties worldwide. The House passed the clause in July as part of the broader annual defense policy bill, but it has not yet been adopted into law.

Trump, meanwhile, has claimed no knowledge of the stays.

"I know nothing about an Air Force plane landing at an airport (which I do not own and have nothing to do with) near Turnberry Resort (which I do own) in Scotland, and filling up with fuel, with the crew staying overnight at Turnberry (they have good taste!),” he tweeted on Monday. “NOTHING TO DO WITH ME.”

As Trump Looted FEMA and the Military for His Border Policies, DHS Bought High-End Chairs With Taxpayer Funds

Herman Miller, the luxury furniture maker whose Aeron chair is in the Museum of Modern Art, is the most frequent recipient of DHS money for office furniture.

​As President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have swelled detention-center populations on both sides of the U.S. southern border, his administration has repeatedly pillaged funds from key Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programs and agencies to fund cash-strapped immigration-enforcement agencies.

In April, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan told Congress that the crush of undocumented immigrants in the agency’s custody meant that “the system is full,” and that given the scale of the crisis, the department “will exhaust our resources before the end of our fiscal year.”

​But while administration officials have defended the diversion of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from airport-security operations, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster-relief fund, and the U.S. Coast Guard, DHS has spent nearly $120 million of its funding… on office furniture.

Since President Trump’s inauguration, DHS and its subsidiary agencies have spent $119,530,544.14 on office furniture, according to data compiled from the service USA Spending, which tracks federal spending. Since the implementation of the administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which resulted in the traumatic separation of thousands of migrant children from their families, the department has spent $79,359,212.32.

​According to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cost-per-night estimate, the Trump administration’s furniture expenditure for the department would have been enough to run the agency’s family-detention facility in Dilley, Texas, at full capacity for nearly half a year. It’s also almost enough to repay FEMA for $155 million in federal disaster aid that was diverted to ICE last month. (Just in time for hurricane season.)

Much of the new furniture is earmarked for the department’s new Washington, D.C. headquarters, dubbed “the most ambitious federal building project since the Pentagon.” The project, a 4.5 million-square-foot office complex due to be completed in 2026, is the largest construction job in the history of the General Services Administration.

A review of purchase descriptions reveal that a surprisingly large percentage of the department’s furniture outlays rest—recline?—on an expensive taste in office chairs. Herman Miller, the luxury furniture maker whose Aeron chair is featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, is the most frequent recipient of DHS orders for office furniture.

​In July, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) placed an order to the company for $515,976.09 for office furniture intended for its service center in Laguna Niguel, California. In May, the agency spent $786,409.61 on Herman Miller furniture for an application support center in nearby Tustin. One month before that, USCIS spent $803,095.54 for furniture, also from Herman Miller, for an office in Jackson, Mississippi.

DHS did not return a request for comment on its budgetary priorities, or whether its furniture budget might be a better target for redirecting funds than disaster relief.

​Meanwhile, immigrants in detention centers have been on the receiving end of miserable conditions caused, in part, by underfunding and overcrowding. In February, for example, more than 2,000 Central American migrants were held in an abandoned body-bag factory in Piedras Negras, Mexico, complaining of being “prisoners” in a facility where nighttime temperatures dropped below freezing and where there weren’t enough clothes or cots to go around.

President Trump, meanwhile, has shown little compunction for repurposing federal taxpayer dollars earmarked for public safety, education, and the military to be used for his immigration agenda. On Tuesday, The Daily Beast reported that the Trump administration plans to pay for his long-promised border wall with funds redirected from the construction of elementary schools, hazardous-waste warehouse facilities, and fire stations.

​Late last week, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) deadlocked on whether to pursue an investigation into potential Russian financing of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The split 2-2 vote fell along partisan lines, with the FEC’s two Republicans voting against any further inquiry into whether Alexander Torshin, a sanctioned Russian official, and Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent, grew close to the NRA in order to help direct the group’s 2016 political donations.

FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub castigated her Republican colleagues in an open letter, issued immediately after the vote.

In the letter, Weintraub noted that the NRA not only admitted that it had received previous donations from unidentified Russian nationals, but that the NRA likewise saw a substantial spike in its own political donations in 2016, issuing nearly $35 million more in political donations in 2016 than in the previous presidential election. The NRA admittedthat Butina had once paid nearly $570 at a 2015 NRA fundraiser, but said it was unable to locate any donations from Torshin or sanctioned Russian official Dmitry Rogozin, with whom NRA officials also met in Moscow in 2015.

Indeed, Weintraub’s letter was scathing, regarding both her Republicans colleagues’ votes against further investigation, as well as regarding the NRA’s relationship with Torshin and Butina.

As Weintraub wrote:

Some allegations are too serious to ignore. Too serious to simply take Respondents’ denials at face value. Too serious to play games with. Yet in this matter, my colleagues ran their usual evidence-blocking play and the Commission’s attorneys placed too much faith in the few facts Respondents put before us.

As a result, this agency barely lifted a finger to find out the truth behind one of the most blockbuster campaign finance allegations in recent memory….

[The NRA’s] search of its records for foreign contributions in this enforcement context was ludicrously inadequate. Who’s on this list of “known Russian nationals”? We don’t know. Were there any suspicious patterns of transactions that would indicate that contributions were being made in the name of another? We don’t know. The NRA’s effort was hardly more thorough than searching a contributor list for the name “Vladimir Putin” and calling it a day.

Weintraub wasn’t the only one to condemn the FEC Republicans’ votes. In a statement to ThinkProgress, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) slammed FEC Republicans.

“A foreign adversary interfered in the 2016 presidential election and the response from Republicans at every level, whether it be President [Donald] Trump, congressional Republicans, or now the Republican appointees on the Federal Election Commission, has been to bury their heads in the sand or actively obstruct getting to the bottom of what happened,” Wyden said.

It’s unclear what next steps may remain to uncover ties between Russia and the NRA. The gun-rights group has imploded over the past few months, with unprecedented infighting spilling into the public. Six NRA board members have already resigned this year, and multiple attorneys general have opened formal inquiries into the group’s internal financing.

Regardless of the FEC vote, it’s clear that the group’s proximity to Torshin and Butina in the lead-up to the 2016 election was, to say the least, inadvisable. As a series of internal FBI analyses, released just earlier this month, indicate, Torshin — who had previously been linked to a massive Spanish money laundering operation — was considered by the FBI a “mobster” who was well-known for his ties to “Russian Organized Crime… and the Russian government.”

a typical repub!!!

Arizona senator’s new financial disclosure makes no mention of underwater loan she once claimed

In 2012, Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) said the bank owned most of her Elgin, Arizona, property, but she has never listed it on her public forms.​JOSH ISRAEL - ThinkprogressAUG 12, 2019, 10:42 AM

APPOINTED SEN. MARTHA MCSALLY (R-AZ) FILED HER 2018 FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE ON FRIDAY. IT MAKES NO MENTION OF THE UNDERWATER MORTGAGE SHE ONCE CLAIMED TO HAVE. (PHOTO BY MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES)

​Appointed Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) frequently boasted during her 2012 congressional campaign that she understood what it was like to be underwater on a mortgage as she had purchased 18 undeveloped acres of land that were worth less than the amount she owed her bank. But seven years later, she has still never listed any such mortgage on her legally-required personal financial disclosure statements.

Despite losing her 2018 senate race, then-Rep. McSally was temporarily appointed to the late Sen. John McCain’s seat at the end of last year by the state’s governor, Republican Doug Ducey. After requesting and receiving a three-month extension in May, McSally filed her first disclosure statement with the Senate Office of Public Records on Friday.

Like her previous filings, McSally noted in this disclosure that she owns “18 Acres of Land” worth between $100,001 and $250,000. The “unimproved land” is in Elgin, Arizona, a community southeast of Tucson and less than 40 miles north of the Mexican border.

In her unsuccessful 2012 House campaign, McSally repeatedly mentioned the property to suggest she understood the challenges her constituents faced after the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting economic meltdown. “I bought land in Elgin in 2006. Oh, it had been climbing, climbing, climbing and, guess what, it was right before it all fell. I’m upside down on that as well,” she claimed in one campaign speech. “I bought some land in Elgin in 2006, although the bank still owns most of it,” she said in another.

​But ThinkProgress reviewed her financial disclosures from that campaign and found no mention of that mortgage. The 2018 filing notes loans on other properties and a 2017 Honda car loan, but still says nothing about an Elgin mortgage.

Last May, a McSally spokesperson told ThinkProgress that McSally “has no loan on Elgin address, and it is therefore not a liability for her to disclose.” When pressed about the contradiction between her speech and her personal financial disclosures, the spokesperson cryptically answered: “Were her forms incorrect? Answer: No. Or was she wrong in her 2012 speech? Answer: No. Both her forms and 2012 speech were correct.” Her office did not immediately respond to a new inquiry about the latest disclosures or the ongoing confusion.

But despite McSally’s long-ago promise that “truthfulness” and “integrity” would be “core values” of her public life, she has repeatedly struggled to tell the truth and to complete accurate public disclosures.

Last month, the Federal Election Commission fined McSally $23,000 for campaign finance violations during her 2014 reelection bid, including accepting $319,000 in contributions above the legal limit from 117 people and failing to disclose $33,000 in political action committee donations. A year ago, an audit by the same agency unanimously found that her 2014 campaign had failed to properly disclose its finances and had failed to collect required employment information for more than 1,200 of her campaign contributions.

Democrats are pushing the Trump administration to review the project, and they say McConnell indirectly helped facilitate it.

Two former top staffers to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have lobbied Congress and the Treasury Department on the development of a new Kentucky aluminum mill backed by the Russian aluminum giant Rusal, according to a new lobbying disclosure.

The disclosure comes as Democrats are pushing the Trump administration to review Rusal’s $200 million investment in the Kentucky project — concerned that the mill will supply the Defense Department — and as McConnell weathers criticism for helping block a congressional effort to stop the investment.

​The Russian firm was only able to make the investment after it won sanctions relief from penalties the Treasury Department initially imposed in April 2018 on Rusal and other companies owned by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and Kremlin ally accused of facilitating Moscow’s nefarious activities, such as seizing land in Ukraine, supplying arms for the Syrian regime and meddling in other countries’ elections.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced in December that the department would lift the sanctions on Deripaska's companies, which had roiled global aluminum markets, if the oligarch agreed to drastically reduce his stake in the businesses. The deal was reportedly potentially beneficial to Deripaska, however. Deripaska himself still remains under U.S. sanctions.

Attention over the sanctions relief deal has focused on McConnell, given his role in halting a bipartisan congressional effort to stop the penalties rollback. McConnell told reporters in May that his support for lifting the sanctions was “completely unrelated to anything that might happen in my home state.”

“A number of us supported the administration,” McConnell said. “That position ended up prevailing. I think the administration made a recommendation without political consideration. And that’s — that was how I voted — the reason I voted the way I did.”

It’s unclear whether the former staffers — Hunter Bates, a former McConnell chief of staff, and Brendan Dunn, who advised the Kentucky Republican on tax, trade and financial services matters before heading to K Street last year — directly lobbied McConnell’s office over the aluminum mill project. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, the law and lobbying firm where Bates and Dunn work, and McConnell’s office declined to comment on whether they had done so.

In Washington, it’s common for congressional staffers to lobby their former colleagues.

Former Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who’s now a lobbyist representing Rusal’s parent company, EN+ Group, gave McConnell “a heads up” on the Rusal deal prior to its announcement, according to a disclosure filing first spotted by The New York Times.

The lobbying push by McConnell’s former staffers, one of whom left his office in November 2016 and the other who left a year ago, also comes as McConnell is being criticized for blocking election-security bills in the wake of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. McConnell took to the Senate floor earlier this week to rebut accusations that he’s kowtowing to Russia, prompting the hashtag #MoscowMitch to begin trending on Twitter.

The lobbying disclosure, made last week, shows Bates, Dunn and three other Akin Gump lobbyists are working for Braidy Industries in the new Ashland, Ky., aluminum mill. Rusal holds a 40 percent stake in the project.

Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation of the project by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency body that can recommend the cancellation of foreign financial arrangements with U.S. firms over national security concerns. ​

senators for sale, no surprise!!!

Fueled by their donations, Mitch McConnell pushes special tax break for bourbon industry

A look at McConnell’s campaign finance history may offer a big clue as to why: hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the alcoholic beverages sector.

The Advancing Growth in the Economy through Distilled Spirits Act would renew an expiring provision from President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill that allows for the deduction of interest expenses related to bourbon inventory when the expenses are paid, rather then when the bourbon is bottled and sold. In a joint press release, Paul said the bill would “preserve Kentucky’s signature Bourbon industry by boosting job creation and maintaining a level playing field between Bourbon and whiskey producers at home and their competitors abroad.”

But back in 2010, an examination by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity calculated the largest individual donors to McConnell over his decades-long tenure in Congress. Of the top five largest career donors, three had ties to the Kentucky-based Brown-Forman Corporation. Brown-Forman’s products include Jack Daniel’s whiskey and Old Forester bourbon.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2014 — the last time McConnell was up for re-election — he also received more in donations from the beer, wine, and liquor sector than any other senator. The total for that campaign alone: $144,950.

So far this year, McConnell has received $5,000 from Brown-Forman’s corporate PAC and $10,000 from the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America.

As majority leader, McConnell has spent most of the 116th Congress ensuring no lawmaking happens. He has boasted of being the “grim reaper” who blocks legislationfrom even coming to the floor and has so stanched the flow of bills that even his Republican colleagues have publicly complained. He has introduced little legislation, aside from housekeeping resolutions required to organize the Senate. So when the Kentucky Republican announces he will push for a bill, it is unusual.

While Paul is in just his second term in the Senate, he too has received tens of thousands in contributions from the alcohol industry.

July 8, 2019​By Matthew Chapman - Raw Story

On Monday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Drew Griffin exposed a story about how a developer in Arizona enlisted President Donald Trump’s allies to help greenlight an environmentally destructive land deal, including Secretary of the Interior and former oil industry lobbyist David Bernhardt, over the objections of regulators and environmental groups.

“President Trump defended his record on the environment today, saying his administration wants, quote ‘the cleanest air and crystal clean water,'” said Cooper. “A new report from Drew you’ll only see on ‘360’ deals with the controversial development in water parks Arizona owned by [a] person connected to Secretary Bernhardt. Here is Drew’s report.”

​“The Village at Vigneto is a massive housing development being planned in this Arizona desert east of Tucson, but like all developments in Arizona, water is an issue, especially for wildlife, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Supervisor Steve Spangle thought before putting in all those homes, golf courses and potentially 70,000 people, government scientists should look carefully how the project would impact the nearby San Pedro River,” said Griffin.

“The EPA had said years earlier that developing the site ‘represented a substantial and unacceptable impact,'” said Griffin. “Spangle decided before the new Villages at Vigneto could move forward a full scale by logical assessment was needed … It was just seven months into the new administration when Steve Spangle received an unusual phone call.”

“It was a solicitor, attorney from Washington, and she told me that she had gotten a call from a high-level political appointee within the Department of the Interior who informed her that our position out here in Arizona was not the position of the administration,” Spangle told the camera. “I felt I had a duty. I work for the administration, I have to do what I’m told, so I did. I felt pressured to reverse my decision and in the simplest terms, I was rolled.”

“Spangle followed orders, reversed the decision, and four months later retired,” said Griffin. “Environmentalists are livid.”

Griffin then delved into the identity of the developer behind the project.

“Mike Ingram is part owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks,” said Griffin. “He donated more than $50,000 to Donald Trump’s political committees. Co-chaired a canceled inauguration fundraiser that promised half-million-dollar donors a hunting trip with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and a private reception with the president. He’s connected to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt too,” through a foundation he once represented, “and since Donald Trump became president Ingram enjoyed easy access to Trump administration decision-makers who oversee his interest.”

​“Schedules obtained by CNN show at least 11 meetings, phone calls, or emails with top administration officials, including then EPA chief Scott Pruitt, and Ryan Zinke, who was Secretary of the Interior,” said Griffin. “And CNN has learned that in August of 2017, Mike Ingram met up with his old lobbyist friend and then Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, the first of at least five meetings with him. This secret meeting, not on any public calendar, was a private breakfast held at his hunting lodge in Montana. Just two weeks later he got the unusual call from Washington that the Villages at Vigneto project was on track again.”

“A lawsuit by environmentalist filed this year has the project on hold,” said Griffin, adding that Ingram “will not talk to CNN” and that he has retained a familiar D.C. lawyer amid the controversy: Lanny Davis, the same attorney who represented Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen.

BY Donald Shaw, Sludge - TruthoutPUBLISHED June 12, 2019

In 2016, Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21 states and, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, breached systems in Illinois and two counties in Florida, gaining access to information on millions of registered voters. In his report, Mueller described the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 elections as “sweeping and systematic.”

Three years later, security experts warn that not enough has been done to address vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations recently told Congress that “the threats just keep escalating,” adding that he viewed the 2018 midterms as a “dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020.”

In fourteen states, some 2018 midterm voters submitted their votes on touchscreens that did not produce paper trails necessary to verify their votes or audit election outcomes. If votes had been inaccurately processed in these precincts — whether through equipment errors or foreign hacking operations — election officials wouldn’t have been able to find or correct the problems.

But all the bills have hit a roadblock. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has reportedly told his colleagues that he will not allow the Senate to vote on election security legislation this session.

“At this point I don’t see any likelihood that those bills would get to the floor if we mark them up,” Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said recently when asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) whether the Rules Committee, which Blunt chairs, would mark up any election security bills. The Hill asked McConnell’s office about Blunt’s comments regarding election security and was referred to the majority leader’s verdict on the Mueller report: “case closed.”

Senator Wyden told Sludge he thinks McConnell does not want to make elections more secure.“The only logical conclusion is that Senator McConnell wants American elections to be vulnerable to hackers and foreign interference,” Wyden said. “It is unconscionable for Republicans to stick their heads in the sand and do nothing after what happened in 2016. If Congress doesn’t act, it’s only a matter of time before hackers successfully interfere again.”

The two largest voting machine vendors in the U.S., Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, together supply more than 80% of the nation’s voting machines. The companies have operated extensive lobbying operations in states for years, and both companies recently hired new lobbyists to represent them at the federal level.

ES&S hired lobbying firm Peck Madigan Jones in Oct. 2018 and paid it a combined $150,000 to lobby the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019.

ES&S did not employ any federal lobbyists in 2017, and when they reported lobbying in previous years it was at a much lower level, spending just $10,000 in many quarters. Dominion Voting Systems, which was recently acquired by New York-based hedge fund Staple Street Capital, signed its first-ever federal lobbying contract in January 2019 with Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck and has paid the company at least $30,000 so far to lobby Congress.

Several of the lobbyists working for ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have recently made contributions to McConnell’s campaign and joint fundraising committee.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck lobbyist David Cohen, who lobbiesfor Dominion Voting Systems on issues related to election security and monitors federal legislation for the company, gave McConnell $2,000 on March 31: $1,000 to his campaign committee and $1,000 to his joint fundraising committee. Lobbyist Brain Wild, who works alongside Cohen on the Dominion contract, gave McConnell $1,000 on the same day.

Emily Kirlin, a lobbyist for Peck Madigan Jones who lobbies for ES&S on election security and H.R. 1, gave McConnell’s campaign committee $1,000 on February 19, and her colleague who works with her on the contract, Jen Olson, gave McConnell $1,000 on March 4.

“It’s not surprising to me that Mitch McConnell is receiving these campaign contributions,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Lawrence Noren told Sludge. “He seems single-handedly to be standing in the way of anything passing in Congress around election security, and that includes things that the vendors might want, like money for the states to replace antiquated equipment.”

“Mitch McConnell’s conflicts of interest in blocking any and all election security legislation is not only shameful, it is placing our democracy at risk,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told Sludge. “The conflicts of interest arise from more than the campaign contributions he is receiving from voting machine vendors — contributions which certainly appear to be a reward from the industry for letting them off the hook — but it is also a self-serving act for strictly partisan purposes.

“McConnell believes this foreign interference in our democratic process will again favor the GOP, and so he is doing everything possible to make sure that window stays wide open for those who seek to do harm to our political system,” Holman said.

McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Voting machine vendors like ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems are not currently subject to any specific regulations or mandatory security standards.

“In contrast to other sectors, particularly those that the federal government has designated ‘critical infrastructure,’ there is almost no federal oversight of private vendors that design and maintain the systems that allow us to determine who can vote, how they vote, what voters see when they cast their vote, how votes are counted, and how those vote totals are communicated to the public,” Noren told Congress recently in a testimony. “In fact, there are more federal regulations for ballpoint pens and magic markers than there are for voting systems and other parts of our federal election infrastructure.”

Several of the bills that have been proposed in Congress would subject them to regulation and oversight for the first time, and some could result in the companies doing less business with the states as they encourage the use of hand-marked ballots instead of machines.

A bill from Senator Wyden — the Protecting American Votes and Election Act (PAVE Act) — would, for the first time, establish minimum cybersecurity requirements that election equipment vendors would have to comply with in order for their equipment to be eligible for use in federal elections. The rules would be established by the Department of Homeland Security, and systems would have to be tested and certified by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

The PAVE Act would also require voting systems to use an “individual, durable, voter-verifiable, paper ballot of the voter’s vote that shall be marked and made available for physical inspection and verification by the voter before the voter’s vote is cast and tabulated.” And while the bill does not explicitly ban electronic systems for marking paper ballots — something that both ES&S and Dominion Voting Systems have begun manufacturing — it specifies that funding it would give to states to replace their paperless systems could not be used “to acquire any electronic device that a voter can use to mark a paper ballot.”If a paper ballot requirement were to become law, with or without a funding restriction such as the one included in Wyden’s bill, the increased costs and security risks of ballot-marking machines could make them less appealing to states looking to purchase new systems.

According to testimony from Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, equipping a precinct with ballot-marking electronic devices costs about three times as much as equipping it with a truly paper-based system along with a dedicated electronic device for voters with disabilities. “Fortunately, the most cost-effective approach is also the most secure: hand-marked paper ballots counted using optical scanners,” Halderman stated.

Another bill being blocked by McConnell, the House-passed H.R.1, includes a paper ballot requirement and would subject vendors to additional new security regulations. Voting machine vendors would be required to follow cybersecurity best practices that would be issued by the EAC’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee, and they would have to report election cybersecurity incidents and response plans to the EAC. They would also be forced to submit their equipment to independent security testing, and the EAC would be empowered to decertify any equipment that does not meet its security standards.​“I don’t know why Mitch McConnell is staging a full roadblock of election security legislation,” Wyden said. “But it is clear as day that there are politicians in the country who view insecure voting equipment as a benefit that helps them win elections. Instead of defending Americans’ constitutional rights, they are looking at this issue from a purely cynical and political standpoint.”

Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017

Overseas investment flowed to Cadre while Trump’s son-in-law works as US envoy, raising conflict of interest questions

Jon Swaine in New YorkThe GuardianMon 10 Jun 2019 02.00 EDT

​A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump.

Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.

Kushner, who is married to Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka, kept a stake in Cadre after joining the administration, while selling other assets. His holding is now valued at up to $50m, according to his financial disclosure documents.

Cadre’s foreign funding could create hidden conflicts of interest for Kushner as he performs his work for the US government, according to some ethics experts, who raised concerns over the lack of transparency around the investments.

“It will cause people to wonder whether he is being improperly influenced,” said Jessica Tillipman, a lecturer at George Washington University law school, who teaches government ethics and anti-corruption laws.

Kushner resigned from Cadre’s board and reduced his ownership stake to less than 25% after he joined the White House, according to his attorneys. He failed to list Cadre on his first ethics disclosure, later adding the company and saying the omission was inadvertent. Cadre says he is not actively involved in the company’s operations.

​The names of the foreigners investing in Cadre via Goldman Sachs are not disclosed by the companies, which are not required to make the information public. Two sources familiar with the firm said much of the money came to the Cayman Islands vehicle from a second offshore tax haven, while some came from Saudi Arabia.

Kushner was initially denied a security clearance by career officials when he joined Trump’s administration. A whistleblower has told Congress it was blocked due to concerns about Kushner’s outside business interests and “foreign influence”. Kushner was later granted a clearance, allegedly after a Trump appointee intervened.

The White House and Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Kushner, did not respond to questions about the foreign investors and Kushner’s stake in Cadre.

A spokesman for Cadre declined to comment on the record. A spokesman for Goldman Sachs, Patrick Scanlan, said: “Cadre does not have access to any information about the Goldman Sachs clients who have invested in these vehicles.”

Cadre was founded in 2014 by Kushner, his brother Joshua and their friend Ryan Williams, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs. The company operates from a building in Manhattan owned by the Kushner family’s real estate corporation.

The company styles itself as an online marketplace where investors can come together to buy property. But it has also built a real estate investment fund, now worth more than half a billion dollars, that is used to buy properties across the US. The fund’s value has risen fivefold since 2017, when Kushner was appointed a White House adviser, following earlier slower growth.

The offshore Goldman Sachs vehicle began collecting funds for Cadre in August 2017, according to a securities filing. The bank announced in January last year that it had struck a deal for clients to invest up to $250m in total with Cadre.

The vehicle is managed by accountants on the Cayman Islands and is owned by another offshore Goldman Sachs entity. The arrangement is legal. Offshore jurisdictions have come under increased scrutiny in recent years from international authorities concerned about their secrecy.

Funding from the Cayman Islands vehicle goes into Cadre’s real estate purchases in the US, according to sources familiar with the company’s work. Cadre charges an annual fee and takes a cut of profits made from the properties.

This funding is separate from ownership stakes in Cadre itself bought by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and foreign billionaires, including the Chinese technology tycoon Jack Ma and the Russian investor Yuri Milner. Cadre last year held talks with a fund backed by money from the Saudi Arabian government, but no deal was done.

Trump and several members of his administration, including Kushner, have bucked precedent by retaining business interests after entering the government. George W Bush and Bill Clinton moved their wealth into “blind trusts”, while Barack Obama had few assets beyond savings accounts and investments in index funds.

Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer in Bush’s administration who ran for the Democratic US Senate nomination in Minnesota last year, said he was troubled by the lack of disclosure around some of Cadre’s funding.

“The problem with Kushner – and with Trump – is that we have all these corporate entities, and often nobody knows who is invested in them and where those investors borrowed their money. We simply have no idea,” said Painter.

Government officials are barred by law from being involved “personally and substantially” in actions that benefit them financially, and are obliged to ensure they do not create an appearance of bias.

Kushner says he has excluded himself from government policy on real estate. A footnote to his financial disclosure form said he was recused from “particular matters in the broker-dealer, real estate, and online financial services sectors to the extent they would have a direct and predictable effect on Cadre”.

The conflict of interest law treats spouses’ financial interests as combined. Ivanka Trump has been credited by Trump with advocating for an administration policy that promises to be lucrative for real estate developers and investors. She denies any impropriety.

Kushner’s own recusal on real estate matters in front of the government would not in itself prevent him from taking actions in other policy areas that could entice foreign investors to Cadre.

In all, Cadre’s investment arm manages more than $522m in assets, according to its latest filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was submitted at the end of March.

​Kushner has had financial ties to several different countries. His family’s single most expensive purchase, a skyscraper on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, was last year refinanced by a fund backed by the Qatari government. In an article for the Washington Post defending the family’s businesses, Kushner’s father, Charles, said foreign investments were “a legal and appropriate stream of funding”.

As Trump’s special representative in the Middle East, Kushner has developed a close relationship with Saudi Arabian officials, particularly prince Mohammed bin Salman. Cadre says it does not have any sovereign wealth funds among its investors.

Sources familiar with Cadre’s setup said a small amount of money in the Goldman-Cadre vehicle, estimated at about $1m, came from Saudi Arabia. Other funding arrived through vehicles based on the British Virgin Islands, adding another layer of offshore secrecy to its origins.

Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the opaque investments in Cadre would continue raising concerns as Kushner carried out his government duties.

“It was one of the only assets that Kushner retained and it continues to collect foreign investors without transparency,” said Canter, a former White House attorney for Obama and Clinton.

Kushner owns a stake worth between $25m and $50m in a “holding company for” Cadre, according to his most recent financial disclosure form, which he filed in May 2018. Kushner and his wife estimate their total wealth at between $235m and $812m.

Cadre was one of dozens of holdings added to a revised version of Kushner’s 2017 financial disclosure form that corrected his original filing.

Williams, Cadre’s chief executive, has said the firm is “democratizing” real estate investment. The small print of its website says its offerings are intended only for people who earn at least $200,000 a year or have a net worth of $1m excluding the value of their home. The company requires a minimum investment of $50,000.

Cadre recently announced plans to raise multimillion-dollar funds to invest in real estate developments in parts of the US covered by the Trump administration’s “opportunity zones” program, which offers valuable tax breaks to developers and investors.

The program was championed by Ivanka Trump, according to her father, who said at the White House that Ivanka had been “pushing this very hard”. The remarks raised allegationsthat policy she worked on could benefit her husband financially. She has denied any impropriety.

June 6, 2019 ​By David Cay Johnston, DC Report @ Raw Story

​William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch even hosted a Trump campaign fundraiser at his Cape Cod vacation home in August 2016. Co-chairs were asked to donate or raise $100,000 for the event; simply attending cost $2,700.

Emails show State Department raised serious ethics concerns about Trump’s secretary of transportation

June 3, 2019​ By Alex Henderson, AlterNet

Officials in the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) spent months planning for Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao’s visit to China, but after all that planning and preparation, the trip was canceled. And the New York Times’ Eric Lipton is reporting that the State Department “raised ethics concerns” in response to some of Chao’s actions when the trip was being planned.

In a Twitter thread, Lipton notes that the ethics concerns came about because in China, Chao’s “family was in the shipping business.” Chao, who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “took a particular interest in picking out gifts for officials she would meet in China,” Lipton tweets.

Lipton, in the thread, posts an August 27, 2017 e-mail from Chao in which she discusses possible gifts for Chinese officials. Chao, in the e-mail, writes, “When I was secretary of labor, I had a number of White House logo souvenirs like: candy bars, leather portfolios, etc. …. Can you find out how to get these White House gifts for us to bring as gifts to VIPs in China? Get a list, prices/items, etc. They will NOT be given out like water or candy…. but to special people.”

​Lipton, in his thread, reports that the DOT “went to great lengths” to “hide any evidence from THE NYT that Chao’s staff was communicating with FOREMOST (the family shipping company that does business in China) while they worked to prepare for this trip. Everything is redacted. Well, almost everything.”

Lipton also explains that after ethics questions were raised by the State Department, the trip was canceled “within a matter of days.”

How a dark-money scam created Alabama's hard-right legislature — and the abortion ban

Mike Hubbard's money-laundering scheme turned Alabama deep red in 2010. He may go to prison, but the damage is done

​DAVID DALEY - salonJUNE 2, 2019 4:00PM (UTC)

A​s the 2010 elections neared, Mike Hubbard had a huge dream and an even bigger dilemma. The chairman of Alabama’s Republican Party wanted to end the Democrats’ 136-year hammerlock over the state legislature. If Hubbard could surf an anti-Barack Obama wave and capture control of Montgomery, he thought, it would be the most “monumental public achievement” in Alabama’s modern political history.

But erasing a 60-43 Democratic edge in Alabama’s House of Representatives and a 20-15 advantage in the state Senate would cost millions. All that cash would not be easy to raise in a poor state, let alone one that wasn’t high on the national party’s list of midterm elections priorities. Unless, that is, he found some way to evade Alabama’s campaign finance laws. Not unexpectedly, Hubbard found his loophole.

When Alabama joined Ohio, Georgia and other states this month in enacting the most restrictive new abortion bans in decades, many political observers mentioned the crucial role that partisan gerrymandering played in creating legislatures — and entrenching legislators — that are much more conservative than the state’s citizens. And like so much in our politics, Alabama’s abortion law doeshave its roots in redistricting.

Alabama’s story, however, might be more sordid and corrupt than any other state. That fall, Alabama Republicans captured those historic supermajorities in the state legislature, thanks to ads that proclaimed: “After 136 years, the Democrats have brought us Obama, Pelosi, government health care, liberal policies, higher taxes, and wasteful spending.” Hubbard became speaker of the house and immediately pushed the state’s politics hard right.

Much of the necessary funding, however — more than $1 million — arrived through an unconventional arrangement of questionable legality with the Republican State Leadership Committee. The RSLC was home to the GOP’s national redistricting strategy. These were the operatives behind a plan called REDMAP — short for the Redistricting Majority Project — that dropped $30 million into a handful of state legislative races that fall, seeking to ensure GOP control of the 2011 redistricting cycle in as many states as possible.

​Alabama had not been high on that list: According to an internal Republican PowerPoint that I obtained called “Redistricting 2010 Preparing for Success,” the state was not part of early GOP thinking for that midterm cycle at all. Then Hubbard approached party strategists with a plan.

It worked like this, according to a detailed timeline revealed by the RSLC’s own lawyers: Hubbard realized he could raise hundreds of thousands from the Poarch Creek Indians, an Alabama tribe with casino gaming interests, and a lobbyist with longstanding ties to the tribe. But that money, Hubbard also knew, would be politically toxic in Alabama, where gambling money is seen as deeply controversial, especially among religious conservatives. So he had his Alabama donors funnel that money to the RSLC. The RSLC, in turn, quietly gave that money back, almost dollar for dollar, to candidates supported by Hubbard or political action groups that he controlled.

These details emerged years after the election — with the Republican supermajorities safely installed in Montgomery — when that internal RSLC investigation by the law firm BakerHostetler sounded alarms about “possible criminal penalties” that could “ultimately threaten the organization’s continued existence.” According to the private BakerHostetler memo — first discovered by Politico in 2014 but not picked up by the nation’s political press, which had yet to understand the importance of REDMAP and redistricting — “the path of the Alabama money could trip over a state law that bans ‘making or accepting a contribution by one person in the name of another.’”

To put this more directly: The lawyers’ report suggested that the RSLC had served as a money-laundering pass-through for toxic campaign donations from casino interests, washing the money clean and then returning it to Mike Hubbard for use in flipping Alabama’s legislature from blue to red.

“It is likely that a prosecutor in Alabama, after investigation, could argue that the routing of contributions from the Poarch Creek Indians to RSLC then back to certain Alabama PACs controlled by Mike Hubbard does appear to violate” the state's campaign finance law, the report concluded.

​No one was charged in that particular case. But Hubbard was later convicted on 12 counts of ethics violations in Alabama, including improperly soliciting lobbyists for consulting contracts and using his office to benefit clients. He was sentenced to four years in prison. His final appeal will be heard by the Alabama Supreme Court next month. The RSLC cut ties with several former leaders after the BakerHostetler investigation concluded; they have all maintained innocence of any wrongdoing.

The BakerHostetler report is a particularly damning and exceptionally rare view inside the sordid world of dark money. At one point the lawyers discovered that $100,000 had been transferred from the RSLC to a PAC historically tied to the disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The report details how the RSLC partnership allowed Hubbard to evade campaign contributions limits at home and sneak around Alabama’s campaign finance laws.

Why revisit this story now? Because Alabama seems like such a solid red state in 2019 that it’s easy to forget that when Republicans captured the state house in 2010, they broke a run of Democratic control that extended all the way back to 1874. For much of that time, to be sure, the state was controlled by conservative white Democrats, many of them overt racists and segregationists. But that had become much less true in recent decades. Powerful black legislators lost their chairmanships after the 2010 election, ending an era in which black Alabama citizens had gained more political power than at any time since Reconstruction.

Now the legislature seated as a result of gerrymandering — and all that dubious money laundering — has passed the strictest abortion ban in the nation since Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure more than 45 years ago. Doctors who perform an abortion would risk a 99-year jail sentence. So the anti-democratic and seemingly illegal manner in which Republicans gained their legislative majority in Alabama matters. It starts with dirty money. It’s followed by an ugly racial gerrymander. Now it has progressed to an extreme policy that polls show is too conservative even for Alabama. Only 31 percent of the state's voters backed abortion limits like this one, which fail to provide any exception in the case of rape or incest.

The architect of this entire scheme, Mike Hubbard, now faces years in prison. Those who live in this state where democracy has been so grotesquely distorted by backroom gerrymandering and money laundering face a future just as unfree: Under the thumb of a legislature that can enforce its hard-right agenda regardless of the peoples’ will.

Big Tobacco Funds Mitch McConnell, and He’s Giving Back With New Bill

BY Alex Kotch & Donald Shaw, SludgePUBLISHED May 30, 2019

L​ast week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced a so-called Tobacco 21 bill to raise the federal minimum age for buying tobacco products, including vaping products, from 18 to 21. The legislation does not include preemption of state regulations or other industry-friendly measures, but it requires states to take follow-up actions that could give the tobacco industry a chance to flex its lobbying muscle and enact its regulatory wishes in states across the country.

Tucked into the bill is an update to a 1992 law, the Synar Amendment, that requires states to enact and enforce their own laws prohibiting the sale and distribution of tobacco products to people under the age of 18. The McConnell bill, which is co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, would raise that age limit to 21, forcing states to update their laws in order to remain in compliance. If states are not in compliance with the Synar requirement, they could lose federal funds available through the Department of Health and Human Service’s Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant awards.

A critic of the bill is fellow Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who introduced his own bipartisan bill that’s similar to McConnell’s but does not require states to pass their own Tobacco 21 legislation.

​“Forcing state action creates a dangerous loophole that gives the tobacco industry an opening to intensify their efforts at the state level to undermine strong anti-tobacco proposals, such as regulations on flavored tobacco products,” said Schatz and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a co-sponsor of the Schatz bill, in a May 21 statement. “Big Tobacco’s fingerprints should be nowhere near this effort. We strongly urge Leader McConnell to join us in cleanly raising the tobacco age to save lives and prevent youth addiction, and work with us on additional efforts, including cracking down on kid-friendly flavors.”

Indeed, Juul has come out in support of the McConnell measure, a seemingly surprising move considering the bill would ostensibly restrict the company from selling to a large portion of its current customer base. “We commend Senator McConnell for announcing this legislation as we strongly support raising the purchasing age for all tobacco products, including vapor products, to 21 and have been actively supporting legislation to do this at the federal level and in states across the country,” Juul CEO Kevin Burns, a major Republican Party donor, said in a statement.

Juul’s 80-plus state lobbyists, as well as lobbyists for other tobacco companies, have been very active, and if the McConnell legislation passes, the Synar bills would give them the legislative hooks they need to enact their wish list at the state level.

Several states have recently seen industry lobbyists attack tobacco legislation introduced in their legislatures, a likely preview of what would happen if states were required to put forth bills to be in compliance with the Synar law. In California, a bill to ban flavored tobacco and vape products was shelved last week after a committee added industry-backed amendments that health groups could not accept. In Arizona, an industry-backed bill that would raise the tobacco age to 21 while pre-empting tougher local laws on smoking and vaping has advanced while a “clean” bill to raise the tobacco age to 21 appears to have stalled. In Arkansas, a bill raising the tobacco age that includes a pre-emption against tougher local laws on flavors has passed.

Public health groups were initially concerned about the Synar language. But Rob Crane, professor of medicine at Ohio State University and president of the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation, told Sludge that his group is more concerned about enforcement, which applies to both proposed Senate bills.

“We strongly support Tobacco 21 bills at the Federal level, but are disappointed that neither the McConnell-Kaine bill, nor the Schatz-Young bill, offer adequate enforcement against rogue retailers selling to kids,” Crane told Sludge. “We are pleased that McConnell’s bill actually incentivizes the states to provide a ‘belt and suspenders’ federal-and-state approach to enforcement, but parents, teachers and health advocates will have to double down in their insistence to state legislators that they live up to their obligations to the next generation.”

McConnell’s office did not return a request for comment from Sludge.

Another bill proposed in Congress this session by Democratic Reps. Frank Pallone (Md.) and original co-sponsor Donna Shalala (Fla.), which Crane praised, raises the age to buy tobacco products to 21, bans all flavored tobacco sales, and extends the Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco regulations to apply to e-cigarettes, among other measures. McConnell, whose state of Kentucky suffers from the highest rate of lung cancer in the nation, did not include these kinds of additional measures that would cut into tobacco products companies’ profits.

​​McConnell’s Cozy Relationship With the Tobacco Industry

Juul’s partial owner, Altria, has been a consistent backer of McConnell’s campaigns and PACs since forming in 2003. According to a Sludge analysis of Federal Election Commission data, the company’s political action committee has contributed $41,250 to McConnell’s re-election campaign committees since 2003, and it has kicked in another $75,000 to McConnell’s leadership PAC, the Bluegrass Committee, a fund McConnell uses to help his Republican congressional colleagues in order to establish his role as a party leader. In the 2018 election cycle, Altria was the fifth-largest donor to McConnell’s joint fundraising committee, which splits its money between his campaign, the Bluegrass Committee, and the Kentucky GOP.

Additionally, Altria employees, including several vice presidents and CEO Howard Willard, have contributed $185,850 to McConnell’s campaign committee, the Bluegrass Committee, and his joint fundraising committee since 2009. Willard himself has contributed $35,300 to McConnell’s various committees.

In the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, Altria, through its subsidiary Altria Client Services, gave $400,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC founded by McConnell’s political allies in 2015 that works to “protect and expand the Republican Senate Majority” by spending money in support of Republican Senate campaigns. The organization is run by McConnell’s former chief of staff, Steven Law.

Juul’s PAC, which was formed in March 2018, donated nearly $100,000 to state and federal campaigns that year. One $2,500 donation went to the campaign of Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), who introduced the Stopping Consumption of Tobacco by Teens Act with co-sponsor Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) in April. The bill “has troubling language with potentially dangerous consequences,” according to the American Heart Association in reference to the bill’s possible reclassification of “heat-not-burn” products as vapor products, exempting them from advertising and other restrictions imposed on traditional tobacco products.

In addition to its 35% stake in Juul, Altria owns tobacco company Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro, which recently had its new “heat-not-burn” device model approved for sale by the FDA.

Altria is headquartered just outside of Richmond, Virginia, which is represented by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a co-sponsor of the McConnell bill. Like his Republican colleague, Kaine’s campaigns have benefited from the company’s donations. In the 201`8 election cycle, Altria’s PAC and employees made the company Kaine’s fourth-largest donor, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Altria and Universal Leaf Tobacco were among Kaine’s top donors in his 2005 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Like Altria, Universal Leaf Tobacco’s parent company’s headquarters are located in Richmond, Virginia.

​The Revolving DoorOn the evening of May 14, dozens of corporate lobbyists and Republican chiefs of staff got to schmooze with McConnell at a fundraiser for the National Republican Senate Committee, according to Politico. Among the event’s hosts were two former McConnell staffers, Hunter Bates and Brendan Dunn, who are both partners at lobbying giant Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.Both Bates and Dunn are lobbying Congress for Altria on the Tobacco 21 legislation.

Bates, who worked for McConnell from 1997-2002 and ended his tenure as chief of staff and campaign manager, is now lobbying Congress for Altria on “support for increasing federal minimum age for tobacco purchases,” proposed rulemaking on flavors, and an FDA-proposed ruleto limit nicotine levels in smokeless tobacco products.

In the 2018 election cycle, Bates made dozens of donations to Republicans, including $1,000 to the McConnell campaign and $1,000 to McConnell’s joint fundraising committee; $3,000 to another joint fundraising committee that gave over $30,000 to McConnell’s campaign; $1,000 to Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s (R) leadership PAC; and $500 to Cornyn’s campaign.

Dunn, who served as an adviser and counsel to McConnell for over five years until leaving for Akin Gump in May 2018, lobbied Congress and the White House with Bates in the fourth quarter of 2018 on the same issues. Dunn contributed $2,700 to McConnell’s campaign and $1,000 to Cornyn’s leadership PAC in 2018, and he’s given $2,500 so far this year to Cornyn’s campaign committee.​Akin Gump’s PAC, to which Bates gave the maximum amount of $10,000 in the 2018 election cycle, gave maximum donations of $5,000 to McConnell’s campaign and to Cornyn’s leadership PAC during the 2018 cycle.

Cornyn, who was the Senate majority whip until recently, has also benefited from Altria’s contributions. His campaign committees have received $19,500 from Altria’s PAC since 2007, and his leadership PAC, Alamo PAC, has received $62,000. The company’s employees kicked in another $35,534 to his campaigns.

McConnell’s current chief of staff, Phil Maxson, appeared at a September 2017 lunch sponsored by Altria and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.

Despite his criticism of the McConnell bill, Crane thinks the bill could easily be fixed to protect public health.

“We think that just a little language tweak, requiring the FDA to actually do enforcement, McConnell/Kaine could be of real and lasting benefit,” Crane said. “And then those folks who care about the brains of our kids will have to fight like hell in the remaining non-21 states.”

Million Dollar Donation To Trump’s Inaugural Comes Under Scrutiny

Franklin Haney’s political donation came as he was seeking regulatory approval and financial support for his bid to acquire an Alabama nuclear plant.

Richard Lardner - huff post​05/27/2019 09:41 am ET

WASHINGTON (AP) ― Real estate mogul Franklin Haney contributed $1 million to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee and all he’s got to show for the money is the glare of a federal investigation.

The contribution from Haney, a prolific political donor, came as he was seeking regulatory approval and financial support from the government for his long-shot bid to acquire the mothballed Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Alabama. More than two years later, he still hasn’t closed the deal.

His tale is a familiar one in Washington, where lobbyists and wealthy donors use their checkbooks to try to sway politicians. It’s a world Haney is accustomed to operating in and one that Trump came into office pledging to upend. Yet Trump has left in place many of the familiar ways to wield influence.

Haney’s hefty donation to Trump’s inaugural committee is being scrutinized by federal prosecutors in New York who are investigating the committee’s finances. Their probe is focused in part on whether donors received benefits after making contributions.

Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has given prosecutors information regarding Haney, his son and business associate, Frank Haney Jr., and the nuclear plant project, according to a person familiar with what Cohen told the authorities. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

Haney had briefly hired Cohen to help obtain money for the Bellefonte project from potential investors, including the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. Cohen is now serving a three-year prison sentence for tax evasion, lying to Congress and campaign finance violations.

Haney and his attorney did not respond to interview requests.

Prosecutors also are examining whether foreigners unlawfully contributed to the committee. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan issued a subpoena last year seeking a wide range of financial records from the committee, including any “communications regarding or relating to the possibility of donations by foreign nationals.”

The inaugural committee has denied wrongdoing and said its funds were fully accounted for.

Haney, 79, has previously faced accusations that his political gift giving is aimed at cultivating influence. An investigation by House Republicans in the late 1990s alleged that Haney’s money and his political pull with senior Clinton administration officials helped him to get the Federal Communications Commission to move into an office building that he had a major stake in. Haney denied any wrongdoing and the Justice Department declined to pursue the matter.

But he was charged in 1999 with funneling about $100,000 in illegal contributions to President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and other politicians, then acquitted. A federal prosecutor described Haney as a sophisticated fundraiser who hoped to impress potential business clients with his access to elected officials, like Clinton and Gore.

Haney’s family-owned real estate business donated thousands of dollars in 2013 and 2015 to political action committees that supported Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who later recommended that the nuclear plant Haney wanted to buy be put up for sale. Haney also contributed to a nonprofit created to promote Bentley’s agenda. The Republican governor resigned in 2017 as he faced impeachment proceedings after an alleged affair with an aide.

In addition to the investigation into Haney’s contribution to the Trump inaugural committee, Haney is in an unrelated legal battle with the nuclear plant’s owner, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Another Haney company, Nuclear Development LLC, has filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the TVA, the nation’s largest public utility, of illegally blocking the plant’s sale to him at the last minute. The utility has argued it couldn’t complete the transaction because Haney failed to get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval for transfer of the construction permits.

A tentative Bellefonte sale in November 2016 involved two partially constructed nuclear reactors and the supporting cooling towers, several other buildings and more than 1,000 acres of land on the Tennessee River. Haney put down $22 million and had until November 2018 to complete the $111-million sale.

On Nov. 29, the day before the sale was to be closed, the TVA scrapped the deal, declaring that Haney’s company had not yet secured regulatory approval as required by the Atomic Energy Act. Haney filed a breach of contract lawsuit.

In early April, about five months after Nuclear Development submitted its application for transfer of the construction permits, the regulatory commission’s staff told the company it needed to submit more technical details before it could proceed.

Edwin Lyman, a nuclear power expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the response reflected skepticism about whether Haney’s company “is serious about or capable of actually undertaking this project or just wants to put the license in its pocket for purposes unknown.”

But Lyman added the five-member nuclear regulatory board is dominated by Trump appointees and may not want to be seen by Congress and the Trump administration as throwing up roadblocks to a nuclear power expansion.

Haney’s Nuclear Development company also has applied to the U.S. Energy Department for financing assistance on the project. The department said it considers the loan application process to be “business sensitive” and declined to comment.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said Haney faces too many technical and financial hurdles to overcome.

For example, Bellefonte’s never-completed nuclear reactors are decades old and are of a unique design that has never received an operating license in the U.S. before. He compared Bellefonte to a Ford Pinto, a 1970s-era vehicle with serious engineering flaws. Smith said it’s “extraordinarily unlikely” Bellefonte will be allowed to operate.​

Republicans spent more than $4 million at properties bearing President Trump's name: report

More than a quarter of the money spent has come from Trump's own presidential campaign, according to a new analysis

​SHIRA TARLO - SALONMAY 24, 2019 4:21PM (UTC)

R​epublicans have spent more than $4 million at hotel, golf and vineyard properties that bear President Donald Trump's name since he was inaugurated in January 2017, according to a report published Friday by The Hill.

More than three dozen members of Congress have held fundraisers or spent the night at the president's properties, the news outlet reported, citing filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

​More than a quarter of the money spent has come from Trump's own presidential campaign, which has reportedly paid his businesses nearly $1.5 million over the last two years.

Watchdog groups and lawmakers have raised concerns over the possibility that Trump could be illegally profiting off of the presidency as candidates, foreign governments and corporate interest groups friendly to the president's agenda have booked rooms and gathered at Trump properties in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the administration.

​Attorneys general in the District of Columbia and Maryland have accused Trump of violating the U.S. Constitution's Emoluments Clause, which prohibits a sitting president from accepting gifts or payments from states or foreign governments without congressional approval. (The Trump Organization announced last February that it donated profits generated from conducting hotel revenuewith foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury, although it declined to reveal the amount of the contributions and how those amounts were calculated. It also refused to identify those foreign customers.)

​"The Trump Hotel is a glaring physical symbol of the Trump Administration's refusal to play by the same rules as everyone else," House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said at the time.

Still, the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit a campaign from spending money at a company that benefits a candidate — and the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) said they did not see anything wrong with hosting events at the president's properties.

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Hill that the campaign "pays market rates for venues, and we report all expenditures as required by law to the FEC." RNC spokesman Michael Joyce meanwhile said the party's donors "enjoy visiting Trump properties and have also pointed to the security, convenience and price as factors" in the decision to hold formal RNC meetings at the properties.

The Hill noted Republican spending at the president's properties has surged significantly since Trump took the helm at the White House. The news outlet pointed to an analysis by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog organization, which found Republican campaigns spent only $468,382 at Trump-owned properties in the dozen years before he announced his presidential campaign in 2015. Since Trump became president, more than 150 political groups, including campaigns and committees, spent nearly $5 million at Trump businesses, the CREW report found.

"This isn't a continuation of a trend. It's not as though Trump properties were a draw for fundraisers in the past," Robert Maguire, CREW's research director, told The Hill. "Trump came into office presenting an unprecedented set of conflicts of interest stemming from his refusal to divest from his businesses. What this spending shows is that far from being a check on these conflicts of interest, his political allies embraced it and fueled it. He's actively trying to profit off of the presidency."

bribery is legal in america!!!

Secretive dark money group got $22 million to get Trump SCOTUS pick confirmed – and most came from one anonymous donor​David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement - raw story17 MAY 2019 AT 15:51 ET

A ​just-published report by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics’ award-winning OpenSecrets.org reveals the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative secretive dark money group received $22 million from anonymous donors in the year leading up to the Tump administration and conservatives’ push to place Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court.

$17 million of that $22 million came from one anonymous donor.

​“The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, pledged to spendas much as $10 million to ensure Kavanaugh’s confirmation — the same amount that it spent to help confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017,” Anna Massoglia and Andrew Perez at OpenSecrets reveal in their report Friday.

“JCN has close ties to Trump’s judicial adviser Leonard Leo, a longtime executive at the Federalist Society, the influential conservative and libertarian lawyers network based in Washington, D.C.”

If you’re not familiar with the Judicial Crisis Network, here’s one of their ads you may have seen on TV in the run up to the Kavanaugh confirmation vote:

Here’s where it gets even more disturbing.

“The bulk of JCN’s funding has typically come from the Wellspring Committee, another secretive nonprofit run by operatives who wear multiple hats in a larger network of opaque groups.”

OpenSecrets adds, “Wellspring has continued to send massive annual endowments to JCN since the group launched in 2005. JCN, in turn, has continued to pour tens of millions of dollars into every subsequent Supreme Court nomination fight and working to reshape the judiciary. Wellspring reported donating almost $15 million to JCN in 2017, on top of $23.5 million in 2016. Neither organization discloses the sources of its funds.”

scamming the suckers!!!

Ex-Trump campaign official now scamming elderly voters out of millions

David Bossie, who helped run Trump's 2016 campaign, raised $15.4 million from elderly voters in Facebook scam

​IGOR DERYSH - salonMAY 8, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)

F​ormer Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie’s pro-Trump group has raised millions targeting elderly Republican voters. But it has spent just 3 percent of that money to promote Trump and Republican candidates, according to a report from the Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog group.

The report shows that Bossie’s Presidential Coalition, a group that claims to promote President Trump and Republican candidates who support him, has raised $15.4 million over the last two years.

Just 3 percent of that money was spent to help candidates, however, while 97 percent of the more than $15 million went toward a six-figure salary for Bossie — who remains a close Trump adviser — along with salaries for his associates and funding for yet more fundraising efforts, according to the report.

"There is no question that the money spent on programming is well below anything someone in the industry would consider a legitimate amount," marketing executive Walter Lukens told Axios.

A majority of donors identified in the group’s tax forms said they were retired, Axios reported. The Campaign Legal Center report showed that the group’s Facebook ads "are overwhelmingly targeted to, and viewed by, Facebook users 65 and older.”

One of the group’s top fundraising vendors, the telemarketing firm InfoCision, recently paid a settlement after the Federal Trade Commission accused them of “false and misleading” tactics and preying on the elderly.

"I gave them money after seeing their mailers, and because I think Trump deserves it,” 86-year-old Minnesota retiree Wallace Payne told Axios. “I'm old and easily fooled I guess. … It's disappointing, very disappointing."

"I thought the money was going toward the president," added Barbara Bloom, a retired widow in her 70s.

One of the group’s biggest donors, 85-year-old George Kunkel, said he donated $101,000 because he thought the money would go "toward supporting the president.”

"I know some of it went to the president and his campaign because I saw the ads," Kunkel told Axios.

Bossie does not formally work for Trump but remains a close adviser and flew with him to a rally in Michigan in March. He alleged that the report was “fake news,” saying that it "totally ignores the legitimate staff, infrastructure and other political activity costs associated with the organization’s work," and adding that "it is expensive to raise substantial amounts in small donor contributions using direct mail, digital, and telemarketing."

But the group’s tax records show that it spent more on copies of Bossie’s book, “Trump’s Enemies,” and other books to give to donors than it did on direct political activity. Another $650,000 went to two other groups run by Bossie, Citizens United and the Citizens United Foundation, much more than it spent on direct political activity.

By comparison, the Republican Governors Association spent 80 percent of its funds on direct political activity.

"Not only do these dubious practices mislead and potentially even prey upon vulnerable populations,,” the CLC noted, “but they also drain resources away from more effective political groups."

That includes Trump’s campaign. A senior Trump administration official told Axios that Trump will not be happy if he learns about what Bossie has been up to because the effort is siphoning money away from the president’s own coffers.

​"The problem the president is going to have with this is 1) he does not like when people are perceived to be profiting off of him, and 2) these are not max out donors,” the official said. “This is money that many likely think is going towards the president's re-election effort when it is not. So effectively every dollar groups like Bossie's and similar groups raise is a dollar the campaign does not."

A top-shelf, closed-door drinking session. $546-a-night hotel rooms. A special government credit card for Mar-a-Lago. Taxpayers foot the costs — and the president profits.

by Derek Kravitz for ProPublica​May 1, 4 a.m. EDT

In April 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate and club, for a two-day summit. While Xi and his delegation stayed at a nearby hotel, Trump and his advisers stayed at the peach-colored, waterfront resort.

That evening, Trump and a dozen of his closest advisers hosted Xi and the Chinese delegation in an ornate dining room where they ate Dover sole and New York strip steak. Those sorts of lavish, formal gatherings are expected for a major bilateral summit.

But then there are less formal events. At some point later that evening, a group repaired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, a wood-paneled study with a portrait of Trump in tennis whites (titled “The Visionary”) hanging nearby. The group asked the bartender to leave the room so it “could speak confidentially,” according to an email written by Mar-a-Lago’s catering director, Brooke Watson.

​The Secret Service guarded the door, according to the email. The bartender wasn’t allowed to return. And members of the group began pouring themselves drinks. No one paid.

Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. Watson’s email did not specify how many people consumed the alcohol or who the participants were. (It stated that she was told the participants included then-strategist Steve Bannon and then-deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin. Bannon, who has said he stopped drinking years ago, said he didn’t drink at Mar-a-Lago and didn’t recall the episode. Hagin did not respond to requests for comment.)

The bill was sent to the State Department, which objected to covering it. It was then forwarded to the White House, which paid the tab.

The unusual cocktail hour underscores a unique push and pull in the current administration: Donald Trump’s White House pays a bill and Donald Trump’s club reaps the revenue. (It’s unclear if the White House asked any of those drinking to reimburse the government; the White House declined to comment.)

The premium liquor costs are only the beginning of government spending at Mar-a-Lago that emerges in hundreds of pages of receipts and email correspondence between Trump Organization employees and staffers for the State Department, which oversees presidential diplomatic travel and works with the Secret Service and White House. The emails show that the president’s company refused to agree to what was essentially a bulk-purchase agreement with the federal government, and that it charged the maximum allowable federal rate for hotel rooms. The Trump Organization could be obstinate when it came to rates for, say, function rooms at Mar-a-Lago, a problem that was eased when the president signed a law lifting the maximum “micro-purchase” the government can make.

​The emails have been released as part of an ongoing lawsuit between the nonprofit Property of the People, a Washington-based transparency group, and the federal government. Property of the People provided the emails and receipts to ProPublica and we, in turn, have added them to our tracker of government spending at Trump-owned properties for our interactive graphic Paying the President. (The State Department is expected to release an additional 1,800 pages of records as part of the lawsuit, which was filed under the Freedom of Information Act.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, the State Department asked for and received the documents described in this article. State Department officials promised a detailed response, but then declined comment.

The documents reveal the intersection between Trump’s conflicting interests. The emails show that “Mar-a-Lago wanted to have the government money without the government rules,” said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who served on the congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

​A few months after Trump’s inauguration, the State Department proposed a contract that would pay $200,000 for all room costs for federal employees who stay at Mar-a-Lago over the first term of his presidency. But Mar-a-Lago rejected the government’s proposal. Instead, Trump’s resort bills the government the maximum permitted by federal rules: 300% of the government’s per diem rate, which works out to $546 per night.

Mar-a-Lago rejected the proposed flat-fee arrangement, according to the emails, because of concerns the club’s lawyers had about the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR, which governs federal purchases and is overseen by contracting officers. FAR seeks to promote competition and maintain “the public’s trust.”

The emails suggest the Trump Organization was worried that the lack of competitive bidding could run afoul of federal rules, among other concerns. A State Department staffer wrote in May 2017 that Mar-a-Lago’s attorneys brought up federal “small business set-aside” requirements, which set strict rules for sole-source government bids for small businesses. The State Department staffer wrote that Mar-a-Lago’s “concerns are based on their general lack of knowledge on the applicability of the FAR regulations.”

Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Organization did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Since Mar-a-Lago wouldn’t agree to a bulk contract, the State Department had to go to Plan B. When it came to the meeting with China’s president, for example, the agency had to go into some contortions to make Mar-a-Lago’s $546 nightly room rate square with its rules on competitive bidding, given that there are other less expensive hotels nearby. At least 16 staffers stayed at the Hampton Inn in West Palm Beach; at least eight stayed at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn; and four others stayed at the Tideline Ocean Resort & Spa, where the press pool also stayed, according to a hotel manifest obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. The government-negotiated rates at those establishments ranged from $195 to $305 per night.

(At least 24 White House and federal staffers stayed at Mar-a-Lago during the Xi visit. They included then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; then-chief of staff Reince Priebus; then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; then-National Economic Council adviser Gary Cohn; and other advisers, past and present, such as Bannon, Hope Hicks, Stephen Miller and Sean Spicer.)

The State Department also broke with protocol regarding taxpayer-funded travel and applied for a Citibank travel card just for Mar-a-Lago visits.

Meanwhile, other problems emerged:

Mar-a-Lago can’t process charges over $10,000, which led to problems when the club split bills and charged the government card for multiple transactions, emails show.

Mar-a-Lago refused government requests to waive the costs of its “function room” for press and other official meetings in April 2017, leading to a near-violation of a $3,500 government spending cap. Last year, Trump signed a law that lifted that cap, known as the “micro-purchase threshold,” from $3,500 to $10,000. The law does not appear to have been aimed at facilitating spending at Mar-a-Lago, but it allows the club to avoid additional government contracting rules when charging sums below $10,000.

In one instance, after the government was charged more than $3,500 for conference space at Mar-a-Lago, it asked the Trump Organization for a 10% discount so that it wouldn’t violate the micro-purchase threshold. Mar-a-Lago relented, but only after months of haggling.

----Many of the expenses incurred by White House staff are arranged and paid for by the White House’s Office of Administration. These expenses are not required to be made public. The same goes for Secret Service spending to protect the president on such visits. (The Government Accountability Office released a report last month evaluating spending at Mar-a-Lago in February and March 2017 and found that a total of $60,000 was spent at the hotel during four trips; the figure ran to $13.6 million when costs for plane travel, secret service, security and other logistics were included.)

The State Department payments, and its work on behalf of the White House and other traveling staff, are considered public records.

​Between 2015 and June of 2018, at least $16.1 million has poured into Trump Organization-managed and branded hotels, golf courses and restaurants from his campaign, Republican organizations and government agencies. Because Trump’s business empire is overseen by a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, he profits from these hotel stays, banquet hall rentals and meals.

Federal spending rules don’t specifically address agency-level spending on alcohol that is directly invoiced to the government, as occurred with the $1,000 bar tab at Mar-a-Lago. The State Department and the White House have had exemptions included in their appropriations legislation to allow for alcohol purchases.

Individual government employees are not permitted to use charge cards for “improper” purposes, such as alcohol, and federal per diem rules allow for charges for breakfast, lunch, dinner and related tips and taxes but specifically exclude alcoholic drinks.

Six government contracting experts said Mar-a-Lago may be violating rules requiring competitive bids. They argue that Mar-a-Lago’s practice of invoicing meeting spaces, hotel stays and meals separately is a way to get around federal spending rules.

“Mar-a-Lago didn’t want to compete, they wanted to sneak around the requirements, and charge much higher prices than the competition,” said Tiefer, who served as deputy general counsel with the House of Representatives for 11 years. “It’s not the first time in history that vendors have tried to get around the rules by charging individual components. This is familiar to every contracting officer. And it’s wrong. It’s not just a technicality. It’s not a game. The only safeguard the public has against the Trumps swallowing up all the government business is at least minimal competition.”

Several experts contend the State Department is exploiting loopholes in government spending rules to facilitate official gatherings at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s one of the biggest fears coming true, that they are bending over backwards to help the Trump Organization,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project On Government Oversight. “I’m frustrated the State Department would exploit the system to bill Uncle Sam and the taxpayers. To have the government bicker to get a 10% discount shows the Trump Organization isn’t putting the American public first. It’s a worst-case scenario when it comes to conflicts of interest, with the president and his children putting themselves and profits ahead of the public.”

“Trump, Inc.” is exploring whether the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is still enforcing consumer financial laws and holding companies accountable. We want to hear from people who work at the agency or left recently (particularly those familiar with enforcement actions, supervisory exams and areas such as payday lending and debt collection). We’re also hoping to hear from consumers and companies who have interacted with the bureau in recent years.

Bob Brigham - raw story24 APR 2019 AT 19:54 ET

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) was sued in federal court on Tuesday for allegedly failing to enforce campaign finance laws against the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Giffords, the nonprofit organization founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) after she survived an assassination attempt, sued the FEC for allegedly allowing the NRA to violate campaign finance law — including to help Donald Trump.

“Plaintiff’s complaints demonstrate that the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) violated the Federal Election Campaign Act by using a complex network of shell corporations to unlawfully coordinate expenditures with the campaigns of at least seven candidates for federal office, thereby making millions of dollars of illegal, unreported, and excessive in-kind contributions, including up to $25 million in illegal contributions to now President Donald J. Trump,” the lawsuit charged.

The lawsuit attempted to explain the scale of the alleged campaign finance violation.

“The illegal contributions to the Trump campaign alone are up to 9,259 times the limit set by Congress. Yet the Commission has taken no action on Plaintiff’s complaints,” the lawsuit said. “In light of this unlawful and unreasonable delay, Plaintiff files this action to compel the FEC to comply with its statutory duty to act.”

The lawsuit claims a “shell company” was created to bypass campaign finance law.

“By coordinating their advertising strategy in this manner, the NRA-PVF and the NRA-ILA have made up to $35 million in contributions to candidate campaigns since the 2014 election, in excess of the contribution limits, in violation of the source restrictions, and without the disclosure required under federal law. This includes up to $25 million in coordinated, illegal contributions to the Trump campaign in 2016,” the lawsuit argued.

Also on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported on the infighting at the NRA.

“Taken together, these facts demonstrate an elaborate scheme for the NRA to unlawfully coordinate with the candidates it supports for federal office, including Donald J. Trump, Thom Tillis, Cory Gardner, Tom Cotton, Ron Johnson, Matt Rosendale, and Josh Hawley, while evading detection of its violations of federal law concerning the coordination of advertising communications through common vendors,” the lawsuit argued.